NFL Films to cheer on the Patriots

Saturday

whenever the Jets have a home game there. New Jersey is true-blue Giants

country. Except, of course, for the tiny little section of Mt. Laurel (down

near Philadelphia) that houses NFL Films.

Forget the green bunting they drape all over the Meadowlands
whenever the Jets have a home game there. New Jersey is true-blue Giants
country. Except, of course, for the tiny little section of Mt. Laurel (down
near Philadelphia) that houses NFL Films.
They cheer for history there because they're charged with chronicling it. So
they make no apologies about where their loyalties will lie Saturday night
when the Patriots invade Giants Stadium, trying to vanquish the true hosts
and put the finishing touches on what would be the NFL's first 16-0 regular
season.
"I'm not embarrassed to say it - everybody here is rooting for the
Patriots," said Steve Sabol, the president of NFL Films. "When you're
working as an historian and you've been following the game for 45 years and
you have a chance to see something that hasn't happened before and may never
happen again (you want it to come true). Our job is to record it for
history. I'm not afraid to say we're rooting for them to do it."
Talk about a perfect match. The Patriots and NFL Films have made beautiful
music together ever since the 2001 club authored one of the great underdog
stories of all time.
Three Super Bowl wins, each decided by a mere three points, two of them
turning on last-second field goals. A record 21-game winning streak. A
genius coach. A quarterback straight out of central casting.
Talk about rich fodder for film-makers.

"The fans have had a tremendous interest," Sabol said. "All the DVDs we've
done on the Patriots (including the '3 Games to Glory' trilogy) have sold
very well. I'm sure if they go all the way undefeated we'll have a 'Perfect
Patriots' retrospective and a special on Bill Belichick. We'll roll out as
much as the public wants."
Would you appreciate the Patriots any less if NFL Films hadn't been there to
document the last seven years? Probably not. But would you romanticize quite
as much about "The Catch" or the "Immaculate Reception" or (insert any great
NFL moment of the past five decades here) if Sabol and company hadn't
preserved it, set it to music and presented it as slow-motion art?
"They do a great job," Tom Brady said this week. "I have a cousin who's in
film, and he always talks so much about how important NFL Films has been to
his career. He's always looked up to them."
Brady, of course, grew up watching Joe Montana in person. But like the rest
of us he also has seen Montana a thousand times over through the eyes of
Sabol's artists/cameramen.
Weird to think that he's the one now getting the same for-the-ages
treatment?
"There's nothing that seems quite too weird now," Brady said with a chuckle.
"There's a lot of weird stuff (about my life)."

CENTER OF ATTENTION

The Patriots have been in a giant fishbowl for a while, of course. But with
that zero still hanging in the loss column, they've blown up even more - to
officially become the hub of the sports universe. Exhibit A: The NFL
Network's pregame show Saturday will run for a Super Bowl-sized six hours.
As you might expect, none of this has caught Sabol off guard. NFL Films
usually has two cameras at every regular-season game, three for its "Game of
the Week." But ...
"We've had four to five cameras on every Patriots game for the last two
months," said Sabol, whose company employs about 300 people. "We were on
this bandwagon fairly early. I said, 'This could be history, and I don't
want it to slip by.'"
Sabol said the 1972 Miami Dolphins, who went 17-0 to set the perfect
standard that the Patriots are trying to match, snuck up on him. To this day
he regrets not documenting their run in more detail - a error he will not
repeat with the 2007 Patriots.
"They were so efficient and so businesslike that before you knew it they
were 12-0, 13-0," Sabol said of Don Shula's Dolphins. "They weren't a
dominant-type of team. You knew that they were undefeated, but you thought,
'Well, somebody will probably beat them.' Even going into the Super Bowl
they were 3-point underdogs. When they did go unbeaten, they did it in such
an efficient way that most people felt" that one of the other 1970s
dynasties (Steelers, Raiders, Cowboys) would duplicate it.
Of course, none did. Does that make the Dolphins the all-time NFL alpha
dogs? Sabol, 65, says no.
"When you talk about the greatest team, to me it's still the 1978 Steelers,"
he said. "To me, in my mind, they're the greatest team I've ever seen. They
had 11 men in the Hall of Fame and they won four championships in six
years."

If the Patriots close the deal in Super Bowl XLII, they will have four rings
in seven years - plus that 21-game win streak and, if the Giants cooperate
Saturday night, a 19-0 finish that would stand as potentially the high-water
mark in American team sports. So, yes, they would get a seat at Sabol's
All-Time Greats table, too.

HE'S A BIG FAN

Sabol, who founded NFL Films with his father Ed (the company was originally
known as Blair Motion Pictures before the NFL bought it in 1964), said Brady
has already "gone past Montana." He said Belichick will "go down in history
with (Vince) Lombardi and Paul Brown and Bill Walsh - not as an imitator but
as someone with his own unique style." And he raves about the way the
Patriots' upper-management team of Belichick, Scott Pioli and Bob and
Jonathan Kraft have avoided the power struggles that have rotted other
dynasties from within.
Sabol, like the rest of us, also has been amazed at Randy Moss'
transformation, likening him to an exotic plant that needs the right
greenhouse in which to bloom.
"One thing I've noticed is that now when he scores a touchdown he just flips
the ball back to the referee," Sabol said of the man who once pretended to
moon Packers fans at Lambeau Field but now confines himself to the
occasional defense-splitting gesture that looks like a breaststroke. "We
have a sound byte from him from some game, I forget which one, and he's
heading back to the bench and somebody, maybe (Matt) Light or (Logan)
Mankins, says, 'Hey, that's your third touchdown, why don't you celebrate
more?' And Moss says, 'Naw, you gotta act like you've been there before.'
That's an old line that Paul Brown used and Jim Brown used."
Behind-the-scenes stuff like that is the lifeblood of NFL Films. Sabol's
crew will be on the prowl Saturday night for more of the same.
"We're film-makers," Sabol said. "That's a whole different point of view.
Television is an immediate medium; we're a reflective medium. All our
cameramen are like directors. Each one has his own style. Then we take it
all back to the studio and it's up to the editors to tame and shape the raw
vision of the cameramen. They're on the field of battle. Instincts are
better than somebody sitting in a truck (giving orders)."
The orders Saturday will be to document history, although Sabol acknowledges
that a perfect regular season would only be half of the story.
"The NFL Network wanted us to do something for this game, but I felt that in
a way to talk about a perfect regular season is jumping the gun here," he
said. "(The Patriots) are on the cusp of history, and if they go all the way
to the end and win that last game, they will be remembered and celebrated as
long as the game of football is played. I can't put it any more dramatically
and emphatically than that.
"(But) the next three games (in the playoffs) will determine it ...
Sixteen-and-oh is great, but the object is to win the Super Bowl."

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